You know, I think a lot of very sincere Christians are shocked when they start to dig in and learn that Biblical condemnation of homosexuality is actually quite hazy and ambiguous.

Like much Christian doctrine, concrete condemnation of homosexuality happened only gelled after the cannon was written and compiled.

Today, Christian leaders who condemn homosexuality do so by assuming it’s sinful and then shoehorning Biblical passages in to make it look like they’re right.

But nobody reading the Bible for the first time (with a nuanced translation and a knowledge of history) would be likely to come away with the idea that homosexuality was a big deal. Hell, they’d be unlikely to come away with the idea that strict codes of conduct and lists of sins are important concepts in Christianity in the first place.

All of that dogma got added after the texts were written. Most of the ideas we take for granted about Christianity were developed hundreds (if not a thousand years or more) after the texts were written.

As a matter of fact, I just wrote about my own Evangelical childhood and what I learned from my Baptist minister father about Christian authoritarianism. It really hurts LGBTQ people like you and me, but it kills spirituality for tons of other people too.

And most of us have no idea what a thin textual foundation it sits on.